A Russian A.T.M. With an Ear for the Truth

[Feuer Frei!]

Russia’s biggest retail bank is testing a machine that the old K.G.B. might have loved, an A.T.M. with a built-in lie detector intended to prevent consumer credit fraud.
Consumers with no previous relationship with the bank could talk to the machine to apply for a credit card, with no human intervention required on the bank’s end.
The machine scans a passport, records fingerprints and takes a three-dimensional scan for facial recognition. And it uses voice-analysis software to help assess whether the person is truthfully answering questions that include “Are you employed?” and “At this moment, do you have any other outstanding loans?”
The voice-analysis system was developed by the Speech Technology Center, a company whose other big clients include the Federal Security Service — the Russian domestic intelligence agency descended from the Soviet K.G.B.


The software detects nervousness or emotional distress, possible indications that a credit applicant is dissembling. That information, Mr. Orlovsky said, would be used in combination with other data, including credit history.
Sberbank is hardly alone in looking over the horizon at new types of banking automation.
Deutsche Bank and Citigroup, for example, are testing futuristic technologies in a handful of bank branches in Berlin, New York and Tokyo. Those banks say their efforts focus on new types of interactive displays and touch-screen terminals, such as a table top made by Microsoft that senses documents and other items placed on it.
And credit approvals by A.T.M. are already a fact of financial life in Turkey, for one, where the bank machines are helping fuel a consumer credit boom that some analysts fear could spiral into a debt crisis.
But Sberbank may be unique so far in trying to turn A.T.M.’s into truth machines.



Sberbank says that to comply with the part of the privacy law that would prohibit a company from keeping a database of customers’ voice signatures, the bank plans to store customers’ voice prints on chips contained in their credit cards.
“We are not violating a client’s privacy,” he said. “We are not climbing into the client’s brain. We aren’t invading their personal lives. We are just trying to find out if they are telling the truth. I don’t see any reason to be alarmed.”

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